We were sitting here over a few cups of coffee digesting the morning news when Meda suddenly sputtered and shook the copy of the Advertiser at me.
She pointed to a long sentence in Derrick DePledge’s story on Department of Education furloughs.
“This makes no sense,” she said, and read the sentence back to me.
Teacher furloughs have been characterized by some locally and nationally as a boondoggle, often without noting that furloughs were the product of a collective bargaining agreement crafted by educators as an alternative to teacher pay cuts or mass teacher layoffs.
Boondoggle?
The implication is that “some” people believe that teachers skated through and used furloughs to escape pay cuts.
Get real. Furloughs are forced, involuntary, unpaid days off. They represent lost pay for each of those furloughed. Each furlough day is a day without pay. They are not an alternative to pay cuts, they are a form of pay cuts.
And I just went Googling for uses of the term “boondoggle” to characterize the furloughs. So far, the only one I found was today’s Advertiser story.
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I would never pretend to be able to read DePledge’s mind, much less understand it, but, to the extent that “boondoggle” means not just the popularly understood “trip on government time that serves no purpose other than to entertain the officer or employee taking it” but also “useless, wasteful, or trivial work” or “a project that wastes time and money”, I suppose an argument could be made that furloughs are a boondoggle, although certainly not for the furloughed employees themselves.
I think “fiasco” would have been a better choice.
How about the Advertiser’s top headline in the Sunday print edition?
“APEC seen as tourism coup”
The story, which was fine, seemed to indicate that a tad more than tourism was in store.
The president of the United States announcing to the world that numerous Asian heads of state, diplomatic, political, NGO and business leaders will convene the largest and most prestigious international forum Hawaii has ever hosted, and the hometown rag reduces it to “tourism.”
Amazingly lame, even for the Advertiser.
Sentence made perfect sense to me.
And he/they are right…
LAYOFFS are the answer!
If the question is, “What can we do to make sure that Hawaii’s children receive an education that will ensure their dependence upon the state into adulthood as they will be unable to compete with the rest of the world?”, then yes, that is the answer.
Layoffs are a failure. What, you think no teacher is better than a teacher for 4 days a week? Stop to actually think about such inane positions.